Leading through Partnership: Development of a Hospital Wide Family Centered Care Collaborative

Though it has been widely recognized that systematic patient and family engagement plays a critical role in strengthening the provision of family-centered pediatric healthcare, significant gaps in knowledge remain regarding how to develop and build a successful model of engagement. As a group of pediatric health care professionals invested in improving the patient and family-centered care provided by our children’s medical center, we saw the opportunity for family and organizational collaboration as a needed “first step” in model development. In this case study, we describe our institutional journey to build connections and resources though the development of a Family Centered Care Collaborative Summit. We review in detail the entire process we utilized leading up to the Collaborative Summit: the preparatory work of conceptualization, identifying partners, and leadership engagement, initial exploratory meetings, developing a needs assessment and analyzing the results, creating a collective vision and mission statement, and the organization of the Summit itself. We continue to grow as an organization towards systematic patient and family engagement. Though we are still early in our programmatic experience, we share our process for the consideration of other centers seeking to make institutional change and looking for models of how to begin.